“…whose basic mode of life is celebration.”
“God is making everything new, and he’s inviting us to the party.” N.T. Wright
Yesterday I told you about one of the books I’m reading in this season of Lent, a daily liturgy guiding my morning communion times.
Well, being a lover of books, I’ve one other volume I’m using as well, a devotional study by N.T. Wright that takes me through the whole book of Matthew over the 40 days leading up to and through Holy Week (with a few Psalms thrown in too). I highly commend it to you — Lent For Everyone: Matthew, Year A. It gives you a portion of the text, translated by Wright himself, followed by a couple of pages of commentary, illustration, application, and a prayer. It has been deeply encouraging, enjoyable, and revealing, all of it pointing the marvelous rescue mission put on by God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
It may be that you don’t have a particular plan for observing Lent this year, as a season of preparation culminating in an Easter Festival celebrating the death, resurrection, and ascension — the victory! — of our King Jesus over sin and death, making available to us new life now and forever. Maybe you don’t even know what Lent is! That’s OK. I didn’t either until my early 30s.
But since then, it has been such a wonderful time each year, pondering what GOD has done for me, for us, for the world. Because, as N.T. Wright observes,
“We fast during Lent, to remind ourselves of the sorrow and sin that still abounds in the world and in our own lives. BUT we do so as a people whose basic mode of life is celebration. God has brought the new world into being in and through Jesus. Don’t try to put the new cloth on the old coat, or the new wine into old bottles. God is making everything new, and he’s inviting us to the party.”
Friends, so much of the Christian life is like this: both / and. We both fast in this season, and we celebrate! GOD has invited us to the party of his rescue, redemption, and future restoration of all things! That’s worth a party. That’s worth a festival of feasting and fellowship (!) — which is what we’ll be doing at Grace Church, Sunday morning, April 20th, with two services with a yummy brunch in between. *** Save the Date! ***
If you’d like a taste of what that preparation could look like between now and Resurrection Sunday, take in yesterday’s reading from Lent for Everyone. I’m hoping it will tempt you to hop over and purchase it.
Enjoy, and celebrate today!
Matthew 9; focused on 9:9–17
9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-office.
‘Follow me!’ he said to him. And he rose up and followed him.
10 When he was at home, sitting down to a meal, there were lots of tax-collectors and sinners there who had come to have dinner with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw it, they said to his disciples,
‘Why does your teacher eat with tax-collectors and sinners?’
12 Jesus heard them.
‘It isn’t the healthy who need a doctor,’ he said, ‘it’s the sick. 13 Go and learn what this saying means: “It’s mercy I want, not sacrifice.” My job isn’t to call upright people, but sinners.’
14 Then John’s disciples came to him with a question.
‘How come,’ they asked, ‘we and the Pharisees fast a good deal, but your disciples don’t fast at all?’
15 ‘Wedding guests can’t fast, can they?’ replied Jesus, ‘—as long as the bridegroom is with them. But sooner or later the bridegroom will be taken away from them. They’ll fast then all right.’
16 ‘No one’, he went on, ‘sews a patch of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat. The patch will simply pull away from the coat, and you’ll have a worse hole than you started with. 17 People don’t put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the skins will split; then the wine will be lost, and the skins will be ruined. They put new wine into new skins, and then both are fine.’
Those of us who now use computers take it for granted that they will have a large internal memory. This is stored on what is called a ‘hard disk’, as opposed to what we used to have, back in the 1980s, which was a ‘floppy disk’, which you had to put into the computer and take out again. They didn’t hold much information, and you always had to be putting them in and taking them out. It was a nuisance. But you get quite attached to the machines you use a lot, and I remember trying to get a technician to fit a hard drive and disk into the old machine I had been using and wanted to carry on using.
Eventually, as we discussed it, he took a deep breath. ‘What you need’, he said, ‘is not to add more bits onto this old machine. What you need is a new machine.’
That wasn’t what I (or my bank manager) wanted to hear. But he was right. The new machine duly arrived, and I quickly realized it was, of course, what I had been needing for some time.
If we get attached to computers and other machines, we get far more attached to the traditional ways in which we have organized and run our lives. And though we all know that things could be better, we all hope that we can simply add the better bit on to the way we do things at the moment, so that we won’t have to change too much, if at all.
This is a challenge every generation has to face, but for Jesus and his contemporaries it was massive. They had lived for many centuries with a traditional way of life. They assumed, naturally enough, that if and when their God came back to rescue them he would support and vindicate that way. And Jesus was telling them that something new was happening. God was indeed doing what he’d always said, but the old machines they had been working with—the things they’d expected to happen—simply weren’t adequate for this new moment.
They were wanting God to put the world right, with themselves coming out on top as the ones who’d always been on his side. What they hadn’t realized was that God would do this for individuals, too, including individuals who up to then had not been on his side. Jesus used a picture for this: the doctor doesn’t go round visiting people who are fit and well, but people who are sick and poorly. In other words: he wasn’t just supporting the status quo. He was doing something much better, much more exciting, much more encouraging for people like us.
In particular, he was replacing an overall mood of sadness and longing with an overall mood of celebration and hope. They used to fast regularly, to remember the times long ago when their nation had suffered awful disasters. Jesus was coming to do something that would always be remembered with celebration—so fasting wasn’t appropriate! That was revolutionary. But it was appropriate.
We today fast during Lent, to remind ourselves of the sorrow and sin that still abounds in the world and in our own lives. But we do so as a people whose basic mode of life is celebration. God has brought the new world into being in and through Jesus. Don’t try to put the new cloth on the old coat, or the new wine into old bottles. God is making everything new, and he’s inviting us to the party.
Today
Thank you, gracious Lord, that you are the doctor who has come to cure us. Help us to celebrate your new life with gratitude and love.
